The things most essential to our lives, like the sun, clean water, or the workers who clear away our filth, go unthanked precisely because they are always there. What moves us instead are rare, dramatic acts of heroism and sacrifice, while steady, invisible service is taken for granted like breathing.
People trapped in mean, cramped conditions can build private places of happiness in their heads, seeing a phoenix where others see a sparrow. The narrower the real surroundings, the harder the mind works to furnish an inner world. As one character puts it, the more cramped your surroundings, the more you should imagine stuff.
When the gap between a person's cheerful picture of life and their actual life grows very wide, the cheerfulness stops looking like strength. It can instead show how beaten down the person is, since only an unbearable reality needs that much repainting.
In a booming city, the people whose daily work keeps it running, such as those who haul and sort its waste, earn the least and are noticed least. Money pours into parks, concerts and exhibitions in town while the villages these workers came from grow poorer. The city never considers their needs, and no street ever carries their name.
For rural people in a fast-modernizing country, leaving for the city is less about a particular job than about refusing the life of a farmer they were born into. Watching others leave breeds envy and a need to make something of oneself, even when the city offers only the dirtiest work.